Taylor Swift’s Latest Countdown: The Planet Holds Its Breath While Rome Burns (and Streams) DAVOS—At 3 a.m. Geneva time, the Federal Reserve’s overnight swap line with the Bank of Japan flickered; traders, like everyone else, were refreshing Swift’s website instead of the yen. A digital egg-timer—five pastel vault doors, each ticking down to unspecified revelation—has…
Inflation Refund Checks: The World’s Most Expensive Apology Note By Our Man in Geneva, Still Waiting for His Own Check GENEVA—The latest fad in crisis management is neither a rate hike nor a stern op-ed, but a literal envelope stuffed with what economists call “inflation refund checks,” and what the rest of us call “hush…
The Curious Case of Bob MacIntyre, or How a Scotsman Quietly Bent the Universe By the time the final putt dropped on the 72nd hole of the Scottish Open, Bob MacIntyre had not so much won a golf tournament as issued a low-key memo to planet Earth: gravity, money, and geopolitical anxiety remain optional accessories…
The Ballad of Justin Rose, or How a Very Polite Englishman Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Our Man in the Fairway, Still Nursing a Hangover from Geneva In the grand casino where nations hedge their soft-power bets—Olympic villages, World Cup stadiums, the occasional F1 paddock—golf was long dismissed as the pastel-colored safe space…
Brennan Johnson and the Astonishing Global Reverberations of a Welshman Kicking a Ball When the transfer window finally slammed shut on deadline day, the fax machines stopped wheezing, and the spreadsheet jockeys in beige offices across Europe declared the summer silly season over, one modest footnote kept echoing from Cardiff to Calcutta: Brennan Johnson had…
A tiny bell above the door tinkles like the last coin in a tourist’s pocket, and suddenly you’re inside what might be the planet’s most diplomatic embassy: the jewellery store. From the diamond districts of Antwerp to the gold souks of Dubai, these glittering cubicles operate as micro-states with their own currencies (carats), customs (no…
**SpaceX: How a South African Dreamer Turned Earth’s Orbit into the World’s Most Exclusive Parking Lot** From a windswept pad in Texas to the diplomatic salons of Geneva, SpaceX has quietly become the first truly global superpower that doesn’t bother printing its own passports. While the United Nations still argues over commas in climate communiqués,…
The Cardinals Depth Chart as Geopolitical Barometer: How a St. Louis Spreadsheet Explains the Collapse of the Liberal Order By the time the latest Cardinals depth chart pinged across Bloomberg terminals in Singapore, oil futures in Rotterdam had already ticked up eleven cents. Coincidence? Perhaps. But in the grand, absurdist theatre of 2024, where a…
Russell Wilson Retires, World Pretends to Care By L. Marlowe, Chief Correspondent, Dave’s Locker DENVER—Somewhere above the 39th parallel, a man who owns more Super Bowl rings than most countries have functioning airlines has decided to stop throwing an inflated leather object for money. The news ricocheted from Denver’s thin air to the thin patience…
Ray Dalio, the man who turned macro-economic paranoia into a $150 billion hedge-fund empire, is currently on a world tour that looks suspiciously like a farewell lap. From Davos to Dubai, he warns that the United States is “on the brink of civil war,” that China is “a civilisation in decline,” and that Europe is…
Cost Stock: The Global Ledger Where Every Line Item Is a Tiny Funeral By Our Man in Geneva, Who’s Still Counting the Dead GENEVA—The phrase “cost stock” sounds like something you’d mutter while hunting for a cheaper chardonnay in a duty-free shop. In reality, it’s the quiet, bloodless term accountants use to describe the value…
Real Oviedo vs. Barcelona: A Tale of Two Balance Sheets Disguised as a Football Match — International Dispatch from the Department of Existential Accounting By the time the referee’s whistle blows in Asturias this weekend, roughly 127 foreign television crews will be pretending the planet’s fate hinges on 22 men kicking a sphere of polyurethane….
